Serguey Asael Shinder – IT Professional

by Serguey Shinder

I worked alongside someone once whose value never seemed to depend on any particular technology, and it took me a long time to understand why. Tools came and went during those years. Whole platforms rose and fell. Languages that were resume gold one year quietly became legacy the next. Plenty of talented people found themselves suddenly less relevant when the specific thing they’d mastered stopped being the thing anyone needed. This person never did. Every shift left them just as useful as before, sometimes more.

For a while I assumed they simply learned new tools faster than everyone else. That was part of it, but it wasn’t the heart of it. What actually made them durable was that their real skill was never the tool in the first place. It was judgment. They were unusually good at knowing which problem was worth solving, at seeing when a clever solution was actually the wrong one, at deciding what to build and, just as often, what to refuse to build. None of that lived in a particular framework, so no framework going out of style could take it from them.

Watching them reshaped how I think about my own career, especially now, with tools that can generate code on demand. It would be easy to feel threatened, to cling harder to the specific technical things I know how to do. But the lesson from that colleague points the other way. The machine can increasingly do the part that was always going to change anyway — the syntax, the boilerplate, the first draft. What it can’t do is decide whether the thing should exist, or whether the tradeoff is worth it, or what actually matters to the people this is for.

That deciding is judgment, and judgment is the last thing to be automated, precisely because it was never really about the tool. It’s built from experience, from having been wrong and learned why, from understanding how the pieces of a real organization fit together. It accumulates slowly and it doesn’t expire when the stack turns over.

So I still learn the new tools, because you have to, and because refusing to is its own kind of slow expiration. But I try to spend my deepest hours on the thing that carries across all of them — taste, judgment, knowing why. The tools I know will be legacy soon enough. The judgment I build compounds, the way it did for the one colleague whose value never went out of date.

– Serguey Asael Shinder